Nvidia Slowed RTX 4090 GPU By 11 Percent, To Make It 100 Percent Legal For Export In China (theregister.com) 22
Nvidia has throttled the performance of its GeForce RTX 4090 GPU by roughly 11%, allowing it to comply with U.S. sanctions and be sold in China. The Register reports: Dubbed the RTX 4090D, the device appeared on Nvidia's Chinese-market website Thursday and boasts performance roughly 10.94 percent lower than the model Nvidia announced in late 2022. This shows up in the form of lower core count, 14,592 CUDA cores versus 16,384 on versions sold outside of China. Nvidia also told The Register today the card's tensor core count has also been been cut down by a similar margin from 512 to 456 on the 4090D variant. Beyond this the card is largely unchanged, with peak clock speeds rated at 2.52 GHz, 24 GB of GDDR6x memory, and a fat 384-bit memory bus.
As we reported at the time, the RTX 4090 was the only consumer graphics card barred from sale in the Middle Kingdom following the October publication of the Biden Administration's most restrictive set of export controls. The problem was the card narrowly exceeded the performance limits on consumer cards with a total processing performance (TPP) of more than 4,800. That number is calculated by doubling the max number of dense tera-operations per second -- floating point or integer -- and multiplying by the bit length of the operation.
The original 4090 clocked a TPP of 5,285 performance, which meant Nvidia needed a US government-issued license to sell the popular gaming card in China. Note, consumer cards aren't subject to the performance density metric that restricts the sale of much less powerful datacenter cards like the Nvidia L4. As it happens, cutting performance by 10.94 percent is enough to bring the card under the metrics that trigger the requirement for the USA's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) to consider an export license. Nvidia notes that the 4090D can be overclocked by end users, effectively allowing customers to recover some performance lost by the lower core count. "In 4K gaming with ray tracing and deep-learning super sampling (DLSS), the GeForce RTX 4090D is about five percent slower than the GeForce RTX 4090 and it operates like every other GeForce GPU, which can be overclocked by end users," an Nvidia spokesperson said in an email.
As we reported at the time, the RTX 4090 was the only consumer graphics card barred from sale in the Middle Kingdom following the October publication of the Biden Administration's most restrictive set of export controls. The problem was the card narrowly exceeded the performance limits on consumer cards with a total processing performance (TPP) of more than 4,800. That number is calculated by doubling the max number of dense tera-operations per second -- floating point or integer -- and multiplying by the bit length of the operation.
The original 4090 clocked a TPP of 5,285 performance, which meant Nvidia needed a US government-issued license to sell the popular gaming card in China. Note, consumer cards aren't subject to the performance density metric that restricts the sale of much less powerful datacenter cards like the Nvidia L4. As it happens, cutting performance by 10.94 percent is enough to bring the card under the metrics that trigger the requirement for the USA's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) to consider an export license. Nvidia notes that the 4090D can be overclocked by end users, effectively allowing customers to recover some performance lost by the lower core count. "In 4K gaming with ray tracing and deep-learning super sampling (DLSS), the GeForce RTX 4090D is about five percent slower than the GeForce RTX 4090 and it operates like every other GeForce GPU, which can be overclocked by end users," an Nvidia spokesperson said in an email.
Hardware or software (Score:3)
> lower core count, 14,592 CUDA cores versus 16,384 on versions sold outside of China.
This is are different chips or just cores disabled in firmware that China will later hack to re-enable those cores?
Re: (Score:2)
With these numbers it may be somewhat marginal cores, but that would mean having two assembly lines. My take is it is just a firmware modification. Not that 11% less are in any way important.
Re:Hardware or software (Score:5, Informative)
Most likely dies with higher failed core counts during test are e-fuse disabled to make chinese-4090.
If demand is high even healthier dies can be artificially e-fused to the 14592 limit.
No separate production line is needed, nor could the disabled cores be reactivated by consumers afterwards.
Re: (Score:1)
Almost certainly firmware. Even consumer cards are the same silicon with failed cores disabled, and gamers have found that they can enable them again, often with minimal visual errors (occasionally a few wrong colour pixels).
You might think twice about potentially voiding the warranty on your 50k Euro card, but if you are buying in bulk and the failure rate is less than 1 in 9, it's worth it for an 11% boost.
Re: Hardware or software (Score:5, Insightful)
In what universe is a 4090 a 50k euro card
Re: (Score:2)
In what universe is a 4090 a 50k euro card
In Typoworld... where no doubt he meant 5K Euro... Which is a little bit of an embellishment but not an egregious one as they go for £2K for a cheap one or £3.5 for an expensive one here in the UK so near enough to 5,000 Euros at the top end. I suspect you're also living in Typoworld as you forgot to capitalise Euro, when referring to the currency it's a proper noun.
/. will
All spelling and grammar mistakes are intentional, Grammar NAZI's need entertainment.
Also I have a dream that one day
Re: (Score:2)
Give it time, inflation hasn't peaked yet and corporate greed has only started.
He may well be from the future, who knows.
Re: (Score:2)
It takes a lot of effort to come up with a post where every single point of every sentence is incorrect. I'm not even mad.
No it's not firmware. No consumers have not upped core counts on their cards. No it's not a 50k EUR card. Not even the correct order of magnitude.
Ernie (Score:3)
Well, thank goodness the Biden Administration is cracking down on this.
Without these controls Baidu's LLM would have 110 million users instead of only 100 million!
Take that CPC!
Re:Ernie (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
It's the same nonsense they were pulling in the 1990s with COCOM. Problem in both cases was that by the time they figured out where to draw their arbitrary line in the sand, things had moved on not just to another beach but another island, off the coast of different continent. I remember going through a copy of Computer Shopper at the time and checking off how many items in there were, according to the US, controlled military-grade technology that couldn't be exported from the US.
It was more than 50% of
Re: (Score:2)
You think any other administration was better at this game? How long have you been watching that crap that you still think that?
You have bonus-motivated corporate lawyers playing against 9-5 government administrators who get paid the same no matter how good or poor their job is as long as they somehow cobble together whatever the bigwigs dream up. How did you think this would run?
Standard corporate ruling class (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Precisely nothing has been circumvented. The cards meet the export performance requirements under US laws. If you're concerned that the line drawn is too high, complain to the government not the corporations complying with the rules.
Oh my heavens! (Score:5, Insightful)
A company operated within the limits set by the government!
That's not a loophole. That's compliance.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a government run by people who don't give a fuck that their limits can easily be circumvented and a corporation that pays a bonus to those that manage to do it.
And before someone goes into an "Annoying Orange vs. Mr. Potatohead" spiel to pinch political pennies, that's how this game is being played, that is fully independent of whoever runs the shitshow.
The last, suicidal gasps of dying empires (Score:2)
And lemme guess (Score:2)
It can be de-throttled with a patch that will unfortunately be leaked by nefarious hackers before the year is over.
They shouldn't have called it a 4090... (Score:2)
They should have released the card as a 4080 Super or a 4080 Ti and claimed that its a "more powerful 4080", would have been less likely to attract the attention of the government that way. (the government who is now saying "please stop trying to end-run the sanctions by building cards that are just underneath the restriction limit")